Collections of visual media files (e.g., images and video) are growing in size and are often in multiple locations. Media repositories may exist on local storage for mobile and desktop devices, dedicated network-attached storage (NAS), or on remote cloud services. It is particularly difficult to search media files. Whereas textual queries can be matched to text content of ordinary documents, an image or video does not include text that can be directly matched. In addition, because of the vast quantity of media files, a manual scan of the media file universe is generally not productive. Furthermore, brute force approaches, such as performing OCR on an entire image, does not necessarily capture critical characteristics that would be relevant to a search query.